Sherman on war

Of course as it also notes, if you say stuff like that, you are called crazy at that time. I guess that’s patriotism and blind loyalty to nations/causes that can be bred and drilled into the majority of people, such that an honest appraisal of the likely outcome is considered nuts or unpatriotic.

One thing that makes me angry is to confuse the leadership, which has control of the armed forces, means of communication and the economy with the people.

The leadership of the pre civil war South were completely in charge. The Phrase “Rich man war, poor man fight’ came from the Southern people.

The war came to an end, when Sherman destroyed the property of the rich.

Were I the leader of an enemy of the US, I’d start by bombing the Hamptons. The ancient style imperialism included removing the top 10% and moving them elsewhere and seemed very effective at pacifying an area.

One obvious thing from a quick perusal of those comments – ‘Armed Liberal’ is quite the dishonest guy. He repeatedly sets up a strawman interpretation (putting it kindly) of somebody’s position, and then challenging them to defend that position.

Tim – off the cuff, Kitchener came closest. While everyone else was talking ‘over by Christmas’, he put together the mass armies for 1916. Not sure if he shared Sherman’s feelings about bloodiness.

OTOH, the US civil war is one of the few wars I can think of in which one side was worthy of support.

This quote is particularly interesting because Sherman really understood the South. He had taught at a Louisiana military academy since 1859 and knew what was going on.

I think he gets so much abuse in the South because he really rubbed the South’s faces in what the war they started meant. He contributed personally a huge amount to the Union victory and ending the war.

“I think he gets so much abuse in the South because he really rubbed the South’s faces in what the war they started meant. He contributed personally a huge amount to the Union victory and ending the war.”

Posted by franck

He took the war home to them, and as somebody above said, took the war home to the slave-owners.

“Appliances of War” is a great band name, ripe for the plucking.

In response to #4, I think you mean Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler (USMC), “War is a Racket” (but he was not saying the exact same tings):
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

fred,

My Southern forefathers fought in every war from the Revolutionary War onwards to at least the Korean War, and everyone in my family always called it the Civil War.

lizardbreath,

Direct civilian casualties were quite low. It was mostly widespread property damage. In fact, the size of Sherman’s army _grew_ as he marched to the sea and into the Carolinas. Many people in the civilian population wanted to join up with his army, and not all of them were escaped slaves.

From Sherman’s letter to the City Council of Atlanta on 12 September 1864 (reprinted in vol III of his memoirs):

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. …Now that war comes home to you; you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect and early success.But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

(But Sherman was unable to extend the same magnanimity to the Kiowas, Comanche, Lakotas and other nations of Plains Indians against whom he directed a much more deadly campaign than the one he directed against the Confederacy.)

The giveaway phrase I’ve heard from some Southerners is “the war between the states”.

I also cruised by Wiki yesterday and refreshed on Sherman. What I always remember about him was his unusual class based analysis of the war and his conscious use of it in his military tactics. In burning Southern assets he took care to burn the plantations of the elites that had started the war and showed repeated mercy for the poor villeins of the South that had been the victims of both the ancien regime and their disastrous secession. That it is the ancestors of those serfs that aggressively fly the Stars and Bars today is unfathomable.

The giveaway phrase I’ve heard from some Southerners is “the war between the states”.

That’s the more usual alternative; anyone who calls it “the War of Northern Aggression” has been absorbing some revisionist accounts.

But the only time I ever hear “War Between the States” in conversation is jokingly, even from my conservative colleagues.

i recall the narrator of a lone ranger episode on the radio – circa late ’40’s – speaking of the war between the states.

IIRC, back in the late 1980s (when last I was there), the South Carolina state archives officially referred to it as “The Confederate War.”

I’ve got to agree with the earlier posters who expressed skepticism about this quote. Apparently Sherman was quoted from memory by a pro-Confederate friend, years after the war. The fact that Sherman’s friend (David Boyd French) was a Southerner helps to explain why this quote gives such a pro-Confederate view of history.

In reality, the North won the Civil War because of superior leadership and because its people were more committed to the fight. The North’s material superiority didn’t guarantee victory any more than US material superiority guarantees a happy outcome in Iraq.

James Loewen reports that Sherman’s army actually grew in size during the march – despite receiving no reinforcements – because of all the citizens of the confederacy who enlisted. This might have been because they’d been loyal to the union all along, but maybe they just wanted to back a winner.

Or perhaps because they wanted something to eat.

Have neoconfederates so poisoned the argument that the Left thinks it must in reaction make a saint of *any* Northerner?

In point of fact — or, considerably less confidently, from my memory — Sherman’s recommended solution to the problem of the Southern Aristocracy was final, down to the last child, I think he wrote to Grant. Of course slavery was morally abominable, and I believe in the old (when he was a socialist) Genovese verdict that the Southern system was never going to change no matter how inefficient it was. But is it enough to excuse Sherman’s genocidal sentiments? And even if you can, because the Southerners deserved it, can you then excuse Sherman for applying the same formula to the Sioux? Surely they didn’t deserve it; surely they were victims of a man (and his pal, Sheridan) who had honed his wrath to a fine point *somewhere*.

Could everyone please believe in the moral cause of the North without canonizing wicked historical figures who happened to fight for the North?

*It seems very strange to say that Sherman’s quote gives a pro-Confederate view of history. It says that the South was doomed to failure from the start, and that embarking on such a venture was criminal lunacy.*

Ex-Confederates did claim that the South was doomed to failure from the start, but that it was still a glorious “Lost Cause.” For one thing, it was a nice way for Southern generals writing their memoirs to justify their defeat. From this point of view, Southerners weren’t lunatics to start the war, they didn’t start it at all! It was the War of Northern Aggression, with the South resisting the North’s depredations on their liberty.

Watson:

Tedd: False premise, so Sherman’s comments don’t enter into it.

Of course, both sides claim to be fighting for liberty and justice, as usual. Yet you knew right away which side I meant.

That’s not surprising because, behind whatever public face one might put forward, we all know that if the U.S. prevails in Iraq the country will have more liberty and justice than it had before. One of the great attributes of liberal democracy is that, notwithstanding any argument-by-motive that might be put forth, no one person or institution has enough power to realize its own vision to the exclusion of others.

The Southern Unionist story is not one that is widely known, but J.R.’s teacher was broadly correct. No surprise, these Unionist areas broadly correlated with a lack of slave ownership in the white population. Eric Foner has a good section on them in RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA’S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION.

Shelby, you are, of course, correct, descendants not ancestors. I’m afraid I’m not much up on my pop-psyche but since I moved to the deep South I’m getting some lessons.

Just yesterday I saw a truck with four different stickers advocating the Stars and Bars ( or Slaves and Graves as a friend calls it ). Since the battle flag was only added to the Georgia flag in the Civil Rights era isn’t this only dog whistle rascism?